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For the past couple months I’ve been busy writing a critique of Ken Wilber‘s thought on “religion”, to be submitted to the journal devoted to his thought. I’ve been critical of Wilber before, and that article will be no different. In the next week or two I expect to post about some further criticisms that the article didn’t have room for.
But I don’t want all these criticisms to make it sound like I think Wilber’s thought is silly, fruitless or otherwise wrong-headed. Quite the opposite. I engage with Wilber’s ideas this much precisely because his project is so important and valuable. Granted, his writings don’t stand up well to either analytic or continental assessment: his arguments are sometimes maddeningly imprecise, and his readings of other thinkers tend strongly to the superficial. But what Wilber lacks in precision and depth, he makes up for in breadth.
For the thing about both the analytic and continental standards of assessment is that they are both generated in the context of contemporary academia – and that is a context that gives out all its rewards to those who think small. When good work is considered to be that which gets the details exactly right, it’s much easier to generate endless articles saying new things, because there are so many new details to talk about. The nonacademic book publishing industry has its own problematic incentives, but they are not the same ones. They don’t push authors to precise nitpicky detail in the same way; and that’s a valuable counterbalance to academia. I do think academia’s details matter a lot. But they matter because they are part of a larger whole. We will not really be able to make sense of the world and our lives if we can’t understand what that whole is, how everything fits together. And that’s where Wilber comes in.
Wilber’s project is an audacious one: to integrate all the different realms of human knowledge, including the “great wisdom traditions” like Buddhism and Christianity. He tries hard to bring together “religion” and science, and he understands that philosophy has a key role in that process.
It would be one thing to make a mere catalogue of these different kinds of knowledge, a road map to the most important books. That much has been done before. Wilber, by contrast, actually tries to consider the truth of the ideas he studies. And not just in terms of declaring them true or declaring them false, but trying to find the truth in all of them. He proclaims, rightly I think, that “no human mind can produce 100% error.” And more than that: when an idea comes to last across multiple generations, that suggests there is particular truth to it – it’s not tied to the madness of one particular clique or the whimsy of one era, but is reinvented with every new birth who take it up and find it valuable for explaining the world and our place in it. Somehow, the ideas need to go together.
This approach too has been taken before to some extent. G.W.F. Hegel tried harder than most. While I think Hegel was more methodologically sophisticated than Wilber, there is a lot missing from Hegel’s synthesis. Science, especially, has changed a lot, making Hegel’s philosophy of nature difficult to accept; so too, Hegel’s thought has no room for the shining achievement of the 20th century, namely feminism and the liberation of women. And while Hegel at least attempted to include Asian philosophies in his synthesis, in a way that few had before, they were stuck at the earliest and lowest level of his philosophy, making Hegel “strong with respect to time and weak with respect to space”. All of these vast gaps in Hegel’s thought – science, feminism, Asian philosophy – Wilber has tried hard to give a central place in his thought. His attempted synthesis is the widest one I know of – much more so than that of, say, Mou Zongsan, who says little if anything about Judaism or Advaita Vedānta, let alone feminism and science. Wilber gives us some vision of what a unified synthesis now could look like.
I don’t accept most of the contours of the synthesis Wilber comes up with, but some of the concepts that make it up have been very valuable to my reflection, especially ascent and descent and the pre-trans fallacy. And beyond the particular concepts, the nature of the project itself is particularly valuable in the era of detail-obsessed academia. Philologists and analytic philosophers usually can’t see the forest for the trees. Wilber’s sweeping generalizations give him the opposite problem: he has a hard time getting the whole forest because he doesn’t understand the trees that make it up. But when the structures of textual production today lead so overwhelmingly to a focus on nitpicky details with no larger context, Wilber’s problem is a good one for a thinker to have.
I was a “fan” of Wilber’s writings during my days as a doctoral student in Canada working on my dissertation, in a predominantly analytically-oriented philosophy department, on Aurobindo. But I can hardly bring myself to read either of them these days and I don’t feel I am missing anything important! LOL
Breadth? Sure, it is important, but when someone presumes that his “breadth” can extend to everything (a la “A Brief History of Everything”), I begin to have serious doubts about the man’s sense of humility and even the quality of his understanding of the human predicament!
There are so many things about our very own and very intimate “Brother Donkey” (As St. Francis of Assisi lovingly called his body!) we simply do not yet understand! Why presume to divagate with assurance on so many things, not to mention “everything”?
Sufficient unto the day honest, useful, and solid work on one thing, however little or limited that thing may be than a torrent of words “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” on this, that, and the other!
““no human mind can produce 100% error.”? If this means that no human mind can produce ONLY error, that’s obviously true since if it were otherwise, the mind (inexorably attached to a body) wouldn’t even be around.
And, again, obviously, if it means that no human mind can produce complete error, or completely erroneous claims or views, it is false. The history of human thought in every area furnishes numerous examples of complete error or falsehood.
“He tries hard to bring together “religion” and science, and he understands that philosophy has a key role in that process.”
It would be interesting to discover to what extent, if at all, Wilber is doing anything here Stephen Jay Gould did not try to do with his muddled notion of science and religion as “Nonoverlapping magisteria”.
(It’s muddled because it is not clear whether Gould is proposing that they be kept separate (Religion as a domain of values – God forbid! And science as a domain of factual inquiry) to avoid conflict or whether he is claiming that they are in fact separate and not in conflict.
Both claims are undermined by the fact that some scientific truths have value implications and the whole of religion rests on claims which affirm and presuppose supernatural entities, processes, events, etc. which intervene in the natural order. These claims are at odds with a scientific understanding of the world.
“We will not really be able to make sense of the world and our lives if we can’t understand what that whole is, how everything fits together. And that’s where Wilber comes in.”
Talk of “how everything fits together” clearly assumes that everything does fit together. What is the basis for this assumption? How do we know it’s true?
Second, granting that “everything fits together”, what’s the basis of the assumption that we can figure it out or know it? It obviously further assumes that we can know everything. This assumption makes an outlandish presumption of the attainment of omniscience by Wilber and/or other humans.
Amod:
A very large comprehensive world view is tested by how it applies to the local because that is where it acts or fails. That’s the reverse of the quip: all right in practice but will it work in theory. Does Wilber’s philosophy have those killer apps? What does he have to say on individual problems? Your position might be – not enough. Though I have only read a few of his works including his ‘Sex’ book, his most impressive writing for me was about the death of his wife. Very moving.
I agree. I have a dim memory of having read Wilber’s “Grace and Grit” in one sitting many years ago, an account of the five years or so he spent with his wife Treya as she was struggling against and eventually dying from cancer.
In light of his ordeal with his wife’s cancer, I know that Wilber, to his credit, has rejected the silly view that illnesses or diseases have their origins in the mind or consciousness.
But, in my view, in the interest of truth, he ought to have gone farther and admitted the obvious: nature is indifferent to our “spiritual” beliefs and practices, however ardent we may be about them, e.g., Treya’s “spiritual” beliefs and practices.
This admission, however, will bring about the collapse of his Weltanschauung.
As the maverick U.G. Krishnamurti (I spent a few days with him in the San Francisco bay area almost two decades) once curtly retorted on the subject of Ramana Maharishi’s painful death from cancer: “Cancer treats saints and sinners in the same way!” (And I had retorted : Do saints and sinners treat cancer in the same way? LOL)
That the universe somehow makes things run benevolently for saints, ardent seekers after God or “enlightenement”, paragons of virtue, etc., is a delusion which must be overcome as a condition of maturity as a human being.
“Though I have only read a few of his works including his ‘Sex’ book, his most impressive writing for me was about the death of his wife. Very moving.”
It’s funny you should say this, Michael. I remember Amod telling me in the summer of 2010, as we walked together after dinner at the conference center in Asilomar, California, exactly the same thing about Wilber’s book on Treya’s struggle with cancer and her eventual death from it.
Indeed, Grace and Grit is a wonderful book. In part I think that’s because it’s the one where Wilber really gets the importance of the particular situation, rather than rehashing the overall philosophy again.
Am late catching up on some posts here, but wanted to say that I too loved Grace & Grit for this. It isn’t that K.W. presents himself “in the flesh,” or even “warts and all,” as opposed to staying swathed in ideas and arguments; it’s that here he shows himself in I-Thou encounter in a way that he never (as far as I have found) wrestles with intellectually in print. There are some gestures towards this in the installations of later installments in the Kosmos trilogy which he’s made public, but (as I have argued elsewhere) he doesn’t really go all the way with this dimension of experience. I will look forward to your paper, Amod. I’m with you on this one: Wilber’s project is worth attending to even though (inevitably) it’s bound to fall short, just because he shows what a really big-picture take would look like.
Philosophers tend to have an M.O. which is characterised by the title of a school. Wilber is an anomalous thinker in that his central experiment or observation is based on meditation or what he has called ‘one taste’. This makes him a radical outsider. By the tenets of Yoga this foundation is a form of empiricism and he is quite open about that. He points to the achievements of the great saints and sages as the proof of his wholism. This is the ‘method of his verification’. If you don’t like it you can go elsewhere for wisdom and the academy generally does so.
“his central experiment or observation is based on meditation or what he has called ‘one taste’.”
We surely would like to know what sort of “meditation” this is, what the alleged truths are, and how this “meditation” yielded those “truths”.
He may have borrowed this notion from Aurobindo (I think Wilber has not acknowledged the full extent of Aurobindo’s influence on his writings).
Aurobindo wrote that he was a practitioner of “mystic empiricism”, an undertaking, he believed, was empirical in just the way scientific inquiry is empirical!
But then Aurobindo never explained, although he wrote several big books, the actual process by means of which he allegedly arrived at knowledge of “occult worlds, entities, and forces”, not to mention the modus operandi of harnessing them, e.g., “Yogic force”, to allegedly cure illnesses, influence world events, etc.
I can knit my brows and focus on you and imagine that I am sending out a “force” to influence you. Any fool can do that!
But to actually prove that there is some “force” in nature that we can manipulate purely with our minds and use it to influence the physical world and its constituents? Well, this requires honesty, hard work, and a strong will to let go of fantasies in light of contrary evidence, very difficult demands to fulfill!
“He points to the achievements of the great saints and sages as the proof of his wholism.”
What achievements? Why are they “achievements”?
“If you don’t like it you can go elsewhere for wisdom and the academy generally does so.”
Is it then merely a naive subjectivist matter of liking or disliking?
How is this different from saying to a critic of American domestic and foreign policy “If you don’t like it here, you can go elsewhere”?
This is simply a refusal to acknowledge the issues.
I don’t know much about Wilber and don’t have an intelligent opinion about him.
However, not everything is subject to understanding through logic and argument. Logic has its place and is unsurpassed in understanding certain truths. But if a tradition is based on understanding through direct experience, it may point at truths that are not subject to logical proof.
There is a funny Sufi story about Nasrudin who lost his house keys one night. He was on his hands and knees combing through the tall grass under a lamp post. Eventually a couple of passersby joined him to help look. After about half an hour, one of the passers by turned to Nasrudin and said, “I haven’t found anything. Are you sure this is where you dropped your keys?” Nasrudin said, “No. I dropped my keys in the shadows way over there. But the light is so much better over here.”
Trying to understand mystical experience with logic and srgument is a lot like this. Of course, the other option is to reject the idea that keys even exist.
Perhaps, the famous Mullah was actually illustrating illogical thinking in this episode?
If you lost your keys in place X, then it is illogical to look for it in another place Y on the (irrelevant) grounds that Y has more light.
Keys are found where you dropped them, not where there is more light.
Mere searching, however intensely, is not enough. Searching which is made easy by external conditions, e.g., lighting, will not lead to the key.
One must know where to look.
If you have lost something within (inner), then it is useless to look without.
You must look within.
If you have lost something without (outer), then it is useless to look within.
I’ve never read more than a few pages of any of Wilbur’s books. They always sounded interesting, but they had a whiff of New Age-iness I just couldn’t get over (it was probably this attempt at a grand synthesis without grounding in details or appreciation of differences). I also can’t imagine being taken seriously were I to cite Wilbur in an academic paper. However, this says more about mine and academia’s prejudices than about Wilbur’s work. Maybe I’ve been missing out.
I do wonder how he became so (relatively) famous. Who’s buying all these books? Is there a way for “respectable” philosophers today to capture some of the excitement around a Wilbur-style synthesis? Is there anything really different about Wilbur than the sorts of simplistic syntheses pursued in early- to mid- 20th century comparative philosophy?
His audience has a New Agey flavour, there’s no doubt about that. But I think they’re New Agers who are growing up a little bit and want some intellectual sophistication behind what they’re doing. Wilber does tend very strongly toward the philosophia perennis approach, so you can certainly trace the roots of the ideas he articulates back to the likes of Theosophy. Is it qualitatively different from their project? Maybe not, but I’m not sure we should be so hasty to rule out their project either. How can all these different claims fit together?
Thanks, Amod. The “New Ager growing up a little bit” sounds exactly like one of my friends who’s really into Wilbur. Where would be a good place to start with Wilbur’s work?
The best starting point is probably still A Brief History of Everything. It’s a condensed version of his magnum opus to date (Sex, Ecology, Spirituality), in dialogue form. It’s a decade or two old at this point and he has changed his views significantly in later works, but in many respects I actually like the older version better. Brief History is the book I started with and I would continue to recommend it.
That’s from One Taste.
For some people this is a useful thing to do, for others it is on a par with speculation about aliens and the Giza pyramid. Julian Baggini(What’s it all about) thinks that the very existence of multiple claims to a unique truth is a reductio of religion. K.W. would say ‘ on the contrary, there is a core of actual experience that is common to all the wisdom traditions’. ‘But that’s just subjective’ J.B. would respond to which K.W. would admit, ‘Of course but you need to try their practices. I have a very nice bit of raja yoga that would suit you here. Never mind the quality, feel the width’.
Don’t believe it, do it! This is where the rich young philosopher turns sadly aside because he is drilled into the view of knowledge as justified true belief. Wilber is mounting a philosophic challenge to this that the academy can’t even see. Is that in effect a hysterical blindness, a willed scotosis?
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